Sheer deliciousness...

I've been fantasising about these since the moment the last one was eaten.

Deliciousness indeed.


Photo by me, the day after the wedding. When I gathered up all the little details that were missed on the day and photographed the bejeebus out of them. It's funny, but photographing food before you eat it makes it taste better. I swear.

A desert fete...

Yet another fabulous blog to share with you, A Desert Fete is the inspiration and adventures of Desert Bride, who left these wonderfully wise words from Ban.do in my comments box the other day....

they're not perfect, but they are fantastic,

and sometimes fantastic is better than perfect.

wouldn't you agree?

Desert Bride is getting married in, you guessed it, the desert in about two weeks time and it promises to be a lovely affair!


Image by Desert Bride.

Procrastinating

Hey there loyal readers who are still dutifully coming back every day to check if I've broken my wedding silence. And phooey to the rest of you, who are abandoning me like scared guests from a wedding where the bride has had one too many signature drinks and the groom was caught ogling the bridesmaids leading to a full on brawl on the dance floor.

A huge huge thank you to all of you for your lovely comments, emails and posts over the last two weeks, they have really meant the world to me and each and every one of you has made me smile so very much. I know you are all itching to hear about the wedding and I am itching to find the words to describe what was a truly wonderful week with some really hideous bits. Because unfortunately, due to a rather horrible experience with our venue on the day of the wedding which has left me distinctly traumatised, the traditional if slightly unimaginative 'It was perfect!!' just won't suffice when it comes to a brief but informative recap.

(Oooh, exciting aside - the phone just ran and I called The Boy 'my husband' for the first time! Shame it had to be to the police.)

I'm also completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of photos we have of the wedding, 2270 to be exact and we're still waiting for the professional ones. I just need to look at them and my brain threatens to explode.

So instead I'm going to distract you with my two new favourite wedding blogs.

Baby, Picture This is the blog of an English girl with lovely taste, a Jenny Packham dress and a flair for gorgeous photography.

Baby, Picture This's maid of honour's dress.
Photo by Baby, Picture This

The second is I Hate Planning My Wedding, a hilarious blog written anonymously by a woman whose family seem to be doing their very best to drive her completely mad and for whom wedding planning is a horribly battle pushing her further and further down the road to alcoholism. A woman after my own heart in other words. She truly cracks me up and satisfies that part of me that is really really pissed off with weddings and wedding venues in particular.


Not that I didn't have a wonderful time and the wedding wasn't utterly wonderful. I did, and it was. It's just that the venue let us down so spectacularly, behaved it such a shitty way to us, our friends and our families that when I think of the wedding those wonderful memories that include moments where I was happier than I could ever have imagined I would be are competing with memories that make me really, really fucking angry.


So, give me a little time. I will find the words, I will figure out the photos, I will share with you the delights and horrors of getting married. I just need a little longer. Thank you for your patience.


Oh, and the police have nothing to do with the wedding, the venue wasn't that bad. We woke up to discover our poor little car had been broken into. Glass everywhere, glove compartment rummaged though, embarrassing medications scattered all over the passenger seat for our distinctly unfriendly neighbours to giggle at. There was nothing worth stealing in it though, we have the crappiest car in the street. It's the only one that looks like instead of an alarm going off if you breath near it, the driver's door might fall off. Removing the need to bother yourself with smashing the window.

Married...

photo by The Boy

I was bad....

.... do you remember The Shoes? The ones I fell in love with online, the ones I begged friends and family members to help me buy, the ones that East Side Bride so adorably had delivered to her house, paid for postage for and waited patiently while a I made a huge mess of paying her back?

The ones that when I went for my first dress fitting I decided looked dirty?

Well I went to pick up my dress yesterday (it stinks of air freshener by the way, isn't that charming?) and I still didn't like the shoes. The grey still looked dirty against the white, they were just kind of blah and I was really struggling to walk in them. So I went a little crazy and bought these....

... I love them. They're so much closer to my original vision of what I wanted to wear. So fun, so happy so 'look at my shoes!' So bloody expensive I want to cry, but let's forget about that for a moment. I actually jumped up and down when we left the shop. That is the sign of a good shoe.


I can't believe all of the almost perfect shoes I disregarded because I wouldn't be able to wear them on the grass and now it looks as if it will be raining too hard for us to even set foot outside. At least now even if it's a grey day I won't have to look at grey shoes though!


Forgive me if my posting and commenting has been rather minimal over the last week. I do not like The Week Before the Week Before the Wedding. I hope that The Week Before the Wedding is better.

An East Side Wedding....

I just wanted to wish a world of love, luck and happiness to Nomi, who is getting married today in British Columbia....

...it seems like no time at all since I was six months ahead of our wedding, just starting a blog and I found another engaged girl who was getting married six days before, who had started a blog the same week and was full of style and sass.

This time tomorrow that girl will be a Mrs!

Congratulations girlie, may you and H Town have a riotous day of love, sunshine and cocktails.

A letter to the bride....

....From 2000 Dollar Wedding bride, Sara....

Dearest Bride-to-Be:
The 12-18 months of wedding planning will pass in a matter of hours or days. When it’s all said and done, the photos will be the primary artifact remaining.

My wish for you—when you look back at those photos—is for you to think:

Look at how relaxed I was. Fully present in the moment. Basking in it. Soaking it in. I was not saturated in stress.

My shoes and dress were comfortable enough for dancing. My beauty radiated out of me; it was not applied to me.

I got to spend quality time with my friends and family. I was myself, not a show. In fact, I was my fullest expression of self.

I do not remember whether the invitations were letterpress or whether the flowers at the ceremony were the same ones at the reception.

The wedding favors or the fanciness of the food did not make memories. The sincerity did. The connection did. The time together did.

It did not matter whether every last detail conformed to the signature colors. Instead of saying, “What a beautiful bouquet,” the guests said, “What a beautiful love.”

This is my wish to you, dear brides, as you pore over wedding magazines and read daily blogs. Some of it matters. Most of it does not. Casting your net in the wrong direction will most surely mean you miss the things you most dearly want to catch.

May your wedding be just one sincere, authentic, happiest day in a long line of many.

This is my wish to you.

All my best,

Sara

What words of wisdom.

Breath, and relax.... (a note to self.)

it's all been too much...

...the late nights, the unreasonable demands, the incessant changes to projects previously deemed OK, the constant verbal (and threats of physical) abuse. They've taken their toll on my darling computer and it is no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, rests in peace. Its metabolic processes are now history. It's off the twig, it's kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. It is in short, an ex-computer.

I am sitting here on The Boy's computer, bottom lip a-quivering, while he tries to revive mine. It's very kind of him to let me use it but it feels all wrong, like borrowing someone else's false teeth, it just doesn't fit.

There is no good time for that extension of your being to pack in, but the week before your wedding? Fucking great. There are countless things to be printed, countless images to use while arranging hair, flowers and decorations all stashed away on it. Emails to be answered, wedding elves to correspond with, sanity-restoring blog buddies to be connected to....

Dear computer, I know I've been pushing you a little hard, trust me I feel it too and if I could give up I would be sorely tempted, but I need you, I love you, please come back to me.... please.....

I'm a Practical Bride because....

-

....Meg says so.

Inspired by Modern Bride magazine's recent advertising campaign ("I'm a modern bride because my wedding costs the GDP of an African nation" ... "I'm a modern Bride because I'm wearing six different dresses"...) Meg of A Practical Wedding ran a contest - I'm a Practical Bride because.... with her two wedding bibles as prizes - Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Meg had 114 entrants and a whole world of answers. But little old me, along with Dearsay and Broke-Ass Bride won!


I loved Dearsay's explanation of why she is a Practical Bride; her wedding to Lauren won't be legally recognised in DC and her answer was a perfect blend of humour and social and political commentary....

I'm a practical bride because I bought a power of attorney before I bought my shoes.
I can't believe that gay marriages aren't legal in all parts of the United States. There is so much that we take for granted in the UK.



Broke-ass Bride's answer cracked me up. So sweet yet hilarious....

I'm a practical bride because I believe the day is only 'perfect' if we end up married. To each other.


As for me...

I'm a practical bride because I really and truly hope that our wedding won't be the happiest day of our lives.


It might seem strange to some; we are brought up to believe that a wedding day is The Goal, that your wedding should be magical, perfect, everything you've ever dreamed of. And that's fine, it's fine to want a perfect day (what scares me is how people define perfect. Does the word unattainable mean anything to you?). It's fine to want your wedding day to be what you dreamed it would be. But seriously, it's a party. You really want a party to be the happiest day of your life? You don't dream of bigger, better, more meaningful days? You don't have goals beyond 'get married, have wedding, wear nice dress'?

We do. There are things The Boy and I want so much more than a wedding, things that we may or may not achieve, things that we yearn for with all of our hearts and if those dreams come true then that may or may not be the happiest day of our lives. But even then, I'm not willing to draw a line under our happiness and say nothing's going to beat this day, it's all down hill from here on. How sad that would be. I plan to live for quite some time, I plan to live with The Boy for quite some time and I hope with all my heart that there are bigger things on our horizons than a wedding day.

Here's to a lifetime of happy days my love.

We're confused....

Wedding presents.

Do you open them when you receive them or do you open them once you're married?

I know you're not supposed to thank people until after the wedding at which point you send out a card with a picture of yourself on it (because nothing says gratitude better than 'I love this picture of myself so much and I thought you would too'.)

But that seems rude. Surely you should thank people as soon as a present arrives? But if you're not supposed to open it then do you just thank them for 'the present' as opposed to whatever the present is?

Or do you open it and thank them for the 'whatever it turns out to be which is a complete surprise because you most certainly didn't accidentally click the link on your wedding list website that tells you what people bought you and also tells you not to touch said link'?

Or do you not open it and pretend you don't know what it is even though you do? Do you thank the giver at the wedding? Is that rude? Does that embarrass them and put them on the spot? Do people expect to be thanked with a slightly disturbing greetings card?

Help.

(I should add - the confusion is in relation to gifts that have started arriving in the mail, not presents that people bring on the day!)